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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Keeping Them Honest: The Long-term Effects of Protestant Missionaries on Honesty and Corporate Tax Avoidance in Modern China

Why would education have a bearing on honesty? The answer, in economic terms, is that the opportunity cost of being found out to be a shabby operator is higher for those with more of it. This observation is just one of several fascinating asides in the paper highlighted this week.

Jiapin Deng from the Sun Yat-sen University together with Qiao Lu and Se Yan, both from the Peking University, wanted to find out if there was a link between protestant proselyting in the the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in China and levels of honesty today.

Protestant missions were active in China in the nineteenth century but their work really took off after the Boxer Rebellions around 1900. It wasn’t the number of converts that left their mark though as these were always comparatively small. It was instead the example, particularly serial help with disaster relief, and institutions (mostly but not exclusively educational and health care) that left a lasting impression.

The indelible legacy being a sense of the ‘right’ way to do things versus the more pragmatic Confucian philosophy of ‘whatever it takes’.

The last foreign missionaries were sent home in the early 1950s and during the Cultural Revolution all religious activity was banned; but that wouldn’t have stopped notions of best practice being passed down, as indeed they seem to have been.

Moreover, in recent years there’s been an upsurge in religious observance in China with some of the fastest growing ministries being those of the Protestant stripe. It’s likely therefore the persistent honesty observed in the research is getting a fresh impetus along with the religious revival.

Here endeth today’s lesson. The paper is an easy and fascinating read and you’ll find it via the following link Keeping Them Honest [There’s a fun ‘honesty map of China’ on P.38].

Happy Sunday.

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